A review by hreed7
How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard
3.0
I almost feel bad giving this book only three stars, given how short it was and how genuinely memorable some of the vignettes in it are.
The good: There are several great summaries of some terrific moments in great books. The librarian in The Man Without Qualities who has never read a book but stays abreast of literary and cultural trends; the detective in The Third Man who is caught pretending to be a famous author and must pretend to be an authority on works he knows nothing of; Montaigne lamenting the creeping process of forgetting every book you will ever read.
Each of these and other clippings mustered in this book is meant to show a particular facet of either "varieties of non-reading" (hearing of, skimming or reading then forgetting books) or "how to talk about non-read books" (to peers, profs, authors, etc.). I'd say I basically could get the point of them simply, and ultimately the takeaways from this book are starkly simple: don't let other people make you feel lesser for having read or not read anything in particular, because we are each defined by our "inner library" and how it relates to others', and in the end any book is merely socially constructed. Seriously, its that simple. I would quite nearly put the advice listed in this book as "fluff" merely because it is so vague, but at least it was a book of entertaining process, if not product.
Bayard would be happy to know that I skimmed the last 40 pages, because it started to show its length despite a trim 180-page girth. I suggest you do the same, and if you did no more than read the chapters featuring the three vignettes I named above, you'd come away entertained and sufficiently equipped to talk about books you haven't read.
The good: There are several great summaries of some terrific moments in great books. The librarian in The Man Without Qualities who has never read a book but stays abreast of literary and cultural trends; the detective in The Third Man who is caught pretending to be a famous author and must pretend to be an authority on works he knows nothing of; Montaigne lamenting the creeping process of forgetting every book you will ever read.
Each of these and other clippings mustered in this book is meant to show a particular facet of either "varieties of non-reading" (hearing of, skimming or reading then forgetting books) or "how to talk about non-read books" (to peers, profs, authors, etc.). I'd say I basically could get the point of them simply, and ultimately the takeaways from this book are starkly simple: don't let other people make you feel lesser for having read or not read anything in particular, because we are each defined by our "inner library" and how it relates to others', and in the end any book is merely socially constructed. Seriously, its that simple. I would quite nearly put the advice listed in this book as "fluff" merely because it is so vague, but at least it was a book of entertaining process, if not product.
Bayard would be happy to know that I skimmed the last 40 pages, because it started to show its length despite a trim 180-page girth. I suggest you do the same, and if you did no more than read the chapters featuring the three vignettes I named above, you'd come away entertained and sufficiently equipped to talk about books you haven't read.